Alchemy and Meggy Swann

by Karen Cushman

  Sitting by the warm furnace working the bellows, she often found herself singing the ballads she had learned from her gran. And that is what she was about one day when church bells began their clangor.

  "Is't midday already?" Master Ambrose asked, wiping his hands on his gown. "Hie you to the apothecary for a measure of antimony."

  "Anon, sir, I be—"

  "Now," he said. "Quick away."

  She stood. "Master Wormwood says you are a man of skill and vision, but he will extend no more credit, for we are exceedingly in his debt. 'Pence,' quoth he, 'not promises.'"

  Master Ambrose huffed and gestured to a shelf by the door. "Take coins from yon copper pot and give them to the thieving Wormwood, that penny-pinching nipcheese, and remind him there be other apothecaries in London."

  "Methinks they all prefer pence to promises," Meggy said, putting down the bellows and picking up her walking sticks.

  Outside she took a deep breath. Although the late-summer days were still warm, autumn was nigh. Her village would be scented with wood fires and ripening apples. Would there be such pleasant smells here, or just the stench of the city gutters? she wondered as she watched young ravens picking at rib bones in a gutter. She sang softly: There were three ravens sat on a tree, Downe a downe, hay downe hay downe, They were as black as they might be, With a downe derrie der—

  Ye toads and vipers. She had forgotten the coins.

  She wabbled back down the lane and into the house, and made her slow and painful way up the stairs. Breathless, she stopped before the door.

  There were voices in the laboratorium. Master Peevish had visitors. He never had visitors. Then she recalled the shadowy figures creeping in and out of the house while she tried to sleep.

  She did not think he would welcome an interruption. Mayhap if she opened the door a crack and leaned in to reach the coins in the pot...

  "I have given you my word," Master Ambrose was saying. "I have naught left of any value but my work and my word." Meggy marked that he did not add "and my daughter."

  She opened the door a bit wider and stretched her arm longer, almost, almost to the pot. Peering through the crack, she beheld a man with a wild mop of orange hair pacing about the little room. "The baron be ever more powerful each day," the man said. "Should he be named to the privy council, 'twill mean an end to us. This matter must be dispatched with all haste."

  Someone else, someone she could not see, said, "I must taste every dish he partakes of, and I have no wish to depart this earth before my time. Good sir, can you assure my life?"

  "I have no small reputation, sirrah," said the alchemist. "Be not afeared. Your tolerance to the substance will grow from doses in wine each day, and when the fatal dose be added to his food, you will merely sicken. Many times I have done this, and I do know what I am about."

  Fatal dose? Master Peevish pursued something fatal ... did that not mean deadly? And he had done it afore? Oh ye toads and vipers. Was this the abracadabra Master Old Cloaks had meant? Would she see the alchemist in the Tower? Or worse, would the hair of his severed head blow in the breeze on London Bridge? She shivered, and one of her sticks clattered to the floor.

  The ginger-haired man hurried to the door, grabbed Meggy's arm, and pulled her through, pinning her stick down with his foot. He had small, piggish eyes in an ill-humored face. There seemed a dark, wet smell about him that affrighted her. "Who or what is this?" he hissed.

  "No one of account," Master Ambrose said. And to Meggy he added, "Err, mistress, err, begone."

  Meggy was indeed eager to be gone, but the other man, fat paunched and pale, said, "She cannot go. She has heard us."

  The pig-eyed man sneered and pushed Meggy away. "She be naught but an accursed cripple. I do wager her wits are as misshapen as her limbs."

  "Aye," the alchemist said, coming to her side. He picked up her fallen stick and handed it to her. "That is the way of her. She be but a moonling, hearing little and understanding less. Go," he said loudly. And then he whispered, "Make haste. Away!"

  Meggy went. She went as swiftly as a person with misshapen limbs and wits could go. And her heart pounded as she hurried from the house.

  TEN

  The antimony forgotten, Meggy waited until the men, and then her father, had left the house before she returned. The girl pondered through a restless night. The alchemist had rescued her from those villains, but what was he doing with them at all?

  In the morning she climbed again to the laboratorium. "Sir," she said, "about what I heard—"

  "You heard naught, mistress," the alchemist responded.

  "But you said—"

  "I said naught. Naught."

  She prayed she had merely misunderstood, that her robustious imagination had caused these fancies of poison and death. She looked at Master Peevish, who was bent over a book, turning the pages with sooty fingers. Were those the hands of a murderer? His face was moody and troubled, not murderous. But her fear did not vanish, merely shriveled into a tiny, uncomfortable knot.

  Heating glass and clay vessels was a treacherous business. They often cracked or shattered. That day Master Ambrose showed her how to prepare a cement for mending the repairable breaks—old cheese, roots, pitch, boiled horses' hooves, and turpentine. Boiled all together, they emitted a stench so horrendous, Meggy thought she would heave her gorge as she stirred, but she did not and was rewarded with a nod.

  The sun was high in the sky when the master said, "Mistress, err, mistress, I wish you to go to Master Pomfret's shop, in the alley off Paul's Chain at the west end of the city. Tell him I require a worm condenser."

  "Aye, certes," she said. "What is a worm condenser?"

  "You need not concern yourself. Master Pomfret knows."

  The alchemist described the quickest way to Paul's Chain, and Meggy, her sack over her shoulder, set off. A warm, dry, gritty wind blew her west along Candlewick Street, and then Budge Row, with its lamb skinners and fur merchants. Blue-coated apprentices called copper pots and silver knives. Peddlers offered oysters, meat pies, cesspit cleaning. Vendors balanced baskets of produce on their heads or carried open pails of fly-speckled milk for sale.

  Beggars grabbed and shoved and howled their misery. One of them screeched to another, "Leave my corner, you wart-necked, flap-mouthed maggot!" and Meggy remembered trading insults with Roger so many weeks ago. What did the boy now? Was he busy with his playmaking? Was that why he did not come to see her? Had he forgotten his pledge of friendship?

  She walked on. Some streets were wider and houses larger, and there she saw shops offering fur-trimmed cloaks and leather-bound books; compasses and drinking goblets of silver and gold; coifs, gorgets, sleeves, and ruffs for the fashionable. Men in richly furred robes and gold chains passed by, and fine ladies with pomanders held to their noses. A man with a ruff so big it looked like he carried his head on a platter gave Meggy a merry laugh until, with a shiver, she remembered the heads on London Bridge.

  The sun shone more fiercely and the day grew hot. Meggy stopped a moment to cool her head, rest her aching legs, and ease her sore hands. "Come and buy the latest ballad," said a ballad seller suddenly beside her. "'Antiprognostication,' it is called, an invective against the vain and unprofitable predictions of astrologers. Or this epitaph upon the death of..." He took a closer look at Meggy and said, "Belike not that one for a fair young mistress. Here be a tale of romance and betrayal: Young Johnstone and the young colonel sat drinking at the wine," the ballad seller sang. "Oh if ye would marry my sister, then I would marry thine."

  Meggy shook her head. "'Tis a fine story, but I have no pennies to spend." The ballad seller shrugged and turned away, but Meggy did have a question. She pulled at his sleeve and pointed to the great building with spires and towers she had seen ahead of her for some while. "Be that the queen's palace?"

  "Nay, mistress, 'tis Paul's, the greatest church in Christendom," said the ballad seller. "Know you not St. Paul's?"

  St. Paul's seemed more a small
city than a church. Houses and shops bordered the churchyard. Meggy passed the barbershop of one Master Tiffin, a button shop even smaller than her own small house, and stalls selling pins, pens, and paper.

  Inside the yard was the great church, with its charred and broken steeple, vast covered galleries, an outdoor pulpit with roof and a cross atop, and centuries of grave markers. Bookshops and stalls clustered along the walls and at the doors of the church itself. She peeped into windows of establishments marked with the signs of the Brazen Serpent and the Green Dragon, the White Lion, the Queen's Arms, and the Blazing Star, betokening bookshops teeming with news sheets and broadsides, printed books, hornbooks for children, and illustrations of hair-raising wonders.

  The street called Paul's Chain boasted large houses and shops, but in the alley the shops were smaller, the street narrower and dirtier, and the crowds less. Even on this warm day it was gloomy and dank, pitted with mud holes where garbage and fresh sewage puddled.

  The shutters were open on a tiny shop with an even tinier stall in front. Ballads and other broadsides were pasted on every surface and lined its shelves.

  She peeked inside, where there were more shelves crowded with stacks of paper, boxes, racks, and mysterious stuffed leather bags on the ends of sticks, the purpose of which Meggy could not imagine, unless they were for small boys to beat each other with.

  And in the center of the shop was a wooden table topped with a great levered screw. It looked to Meggy to be an instrument of torture, likely to press a man into a shadow and squeeze the vinegar right out of him. "I do believe it a fiendish device for punishment," she said aloud.

  "Nay, 'tis a hand press, for printing," said a man come out of the shop with his hands full of papers. "Writing without a pen—or perhaps with many pens at once."

  "Go to! Be you a wizard?" she asked.

  He smiled. "Nay, mistress, merely the printer. Do you wish to buy a ballad? Or to have one printed?"

  Meggy shook her head. "I am but passing on my way to Master Pomfret's."

  "In faith, you have not heard? Master Pomfret died a sevennight ago and was carried toes up to the churchyard at Paul's."

  "Ye toads and vipers!" said Meggy, pushing her hair back from her damp, hot face. "Then I am come all this way for naught."

  "Come in and rest a moment," the printer said, "afore making your journey back. And we might find some cool ale to share. I have no business that cannot wait."

  Meggy nodded her thanks, and a question bubbled up. "Why are you here and not with the houses and shops nearer St. Paul's, which are finer and crowded with customers?"

  "I would wish to be at Paul's, where business is better and customers richer, but shops be cheaper here."

  Meggy looked about her at the dark and muddy street, the sagging houses, and the puddles of slop and rubbish. "I doubt not that it is cheaper," she said. "'Tis a wonder people are not paid to live here."

  The printer barked a laugh as he showed Meggy into the shop and pulled up a stool for her. At that moment a child toddled over. Lifting the wee girl into the air, the printer said, "This is my Gilly. Is she not fine? Have you ever seen a more splendid child than my Gillyflower?" He bent his head and blew kisses in her neck, which made the child wriggle and laugh.

  Meggy felt a stab of sadness and envy. This is a father, she thought. Master Peevish had never touched her and certainly did not think her splendid. He did not even know her name.

  Gilly swung her strong, sturdy legs in delight. Meggy remembered being that young, but crooked and in pain. She felt a touch of pity and tenderness for the lame little Meggy she had once been. She reached out to tickle Gilly's bare toes and was rewarded with a tiny laugh. "Do you like ginger cakes?" Meggy asked the girl.

  Gilly stuffed most of her little fist into her mouth and nodded.

  "Next penny I have to spend, I shall spend on ginger cakes and bring you one."

  Gilly took her hand from her mouth and with it, all sticky and wet, touched Meggy's cheek.

  Meggy wabbled home empty-handed, aching and tired but feeling warm inside from the printer's kindness and Gilly's touch. The warmth survived even Master Peevish's displeasure at the loss of Master Pomfret and the mysterious worm condenser.

  After such a day, Meggy slept deeply, dreaming of ballad sellers, sticky babies, and heads on platters. Near dawn her dreams turned to smoked sausages and hams, and she awoke to the smell of fire. Pulling on her bodice and kirtle and wrapping her cloak around her, she threw the door open and hurried into the street.

  The doors and windows of the cooper's shop were open wide, and she could see stacks of wood and piles of shavings ablaze. The barrel staves were small towers of flame. Two men of the watch pulled a wagon laden with leather buckets of water up to the shop, and they, the cooper, and two drunken gentlemen in stained padded doublets poured water onto the floor and splashed it on the walls.

  Neighborers, some still in nightclothes and bare feet, hastened from their houses and shops to help, pouring jugs of water on the hot coals and beating at the flames with wet burlap sacks. But not her father, Meggy marked. Had he not heard the commotion?

  The morning was cool and dewy, and the fire soon slowed into steaming and smoldering. The walls still stood, the room above was still covered by the roof, but inside the shop all was ash, scraps, and debris.

  The cooper crossed to where his son waited. "Charger was sleeping down here. Where is he?" the boy asked.

  His father took his hand. "Gone, boy. Your horse, the finished barrels, my stock of wood, most of the staircase ... gone." His voice dwindled as the boy broke into sobs he tried to muffle but could not.

  Master Old Cloaks watched from the shadows. After a moment he crossed over to the cooper and, pointing to Meggy, said, "It be that one, her, the Devil's spawn, the cursed cripple, who fired your shop, Master Cooper. It be that one, the daughter of the adept of the black arts. See how her house was spared. Next it will be my shop afire and then yours," he said to the neighborers standing by, "if we do not stop her." Shivers prickled Meggy's spine like icy water dripping from the eaves, and she began to back slowly toward her door.

  Everyone fell silent. There was no sound but for the crackling of sparks and hissing of embers. The cooper looked at Master Old Cloaks and then at Meggy. The watchmen and the neighborers watched them both, and then the cooper spoke. "Nay," he said, "the fire had naught to do with her. My son but dropped a candle in the night, and the shavings quickly caught."

  "I say it was her doing," Master Old Cloaks said. "See her affliction. See how she is marked by the Devil."

  Meggy's heart thumped with fright, but the taller watchman grabbed Master Old Cloaks and said, "You are ever a troublemaker, with your annoyous curses and your accusations, your gripes and grouses. Begone from here afore I take you in for spreading slander."

  Grumbling, Master Old Cloaks retreated, still casting spiteful glances at Meggy. The watchman nodded to her. In the growing light of day, she saw his cheek, disfigured by a large red birthmark of the kind that is called a witch's mark. Belike he too had been shouted at and spat upon in the streets, Meggy thought. She smiled her thanks.

  The watchman nodded again as he picked up his lantern, bell, and staff and followed his partner down Crooked Lane. The tipsy gentlemen returned to their drink, and the others, grateful that their homes were spared, drifted away to break the night's fast with warm bread and cool ale.

  The cooper's shop still smoked and smoldered. "When it has cooled a bit," Meggy heard the cooper say to his son, "we will search for what remains."

  "And we will find Charger?" asked the boy again.

  "No, belike Charger is gone."

  Meggy returned to the house at the Sign of the Sun. The day was growing lighter. She sat herself at the table and chewed a piece of yesterday's bread. Her heart finally slowed its thumping, but her thoughts raced. When she heard Master Peevish's footsteps above, she climbed the stairs to the laboratorium, carrying a piece of bread for him.
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br />   "Ah, mistress ... err, mistress, well met," he said. "I have a task for—"

  "Sir, there was a fire in the cooper's shop," she said as she handed him the bread, "and all the neighborers came to help. Did you not hear the hubbub or smell the smoke?"

  "I was at my work," he said. "Come hither—I require your assistance. Pour this solution into—"

  "Soft, sir, soft. First I require yours," Meggy said. "The man at the old cloak shop next us curses and spits at me in the street."

  "What care I what the man does?"

  "He wishes me ill. This very morning he did accuse me of setting the fire in the cooper's shop. I pray you speak to him ere he—"

  "Fie upon it!" Master Ambrose shouted, waving his bread. "Do not bother me with trifles. Now take this—"

  Meggy's cheeks flamed. "Anon, sir," she said. "I do think this matter no trifle and must attend to it without delay." She picked up her walking sticks, wabbled to the door, and started down the stairs. A cold selfish man, he was, she thought. A mean, small, petty, and ungenerous man who could not stir himself to help her—or anyone. It appears I must strain the curdle from this custard myself, she thought.

  She sat down at the table, chin in her hand. If only, she thought, she could drive Old Cloaks off with threats of the Devil and the evil eye as she had the children in her village. She opened her eyes wider. Aye, she thought, aye, that might serve. And she left the house, her hands trembling on the walking sticks in anger and fear and excitement, as she wabbled to the shop of Master Old Cloaks.